The searchable MyFutureTx.com can be customized to reflect the searcher’s location, household income, and SAT scores. It will help a future college student browse possible careers, majors and college options, warn about college costs and debt and predict future earnings.

If you’re a high school student in Texas and dream of a career in the arts, you might want to know that fine-arts and studio-arts graduates at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls make, on average, about $10,000 more per year than alumni who majored in the same subjects at Sul Ross State University in Alpine—and that the disparity lasts for 10 years after graduation. Yet the total cost of a bachelor’s degree is the same at both schools, around $42,000. The average time to complete the degree is also about the same, a little more than five years.

Several states have developed websites with data on graduates’ earnings, job opportunities across majors, and comparisons of colleges’ costs, writes Johnson. Texas’ site is the most sophisticated.

Anthropology majors who graduated in 2002 make an average of only $46,000 after 10 years on the job, the site warns. Economics majors from 2002, by contrast, earn about $100,000.

Investigating a career as a dental hygienist, I used the site to find eight community colleges that offer an associate degree in dental support services for an annual net price less than $5,000. Statewide, the average time to a dental support degree is 5.4 years, but 84 percent of graduates are employed. The average first-year pay is $44,747. By the 10th year, that’s up to $53,213 — better than graduates with a bachelor’s in anthropology.

But not all dental hygienists do that well. El Paso Community College graduates start at $24,435 and rise to $39,768 in 10 years.

Texas Reality Check encourages young people to estimate their spending, then shows pay, after taxes, for hundreds of careers. A child-care workers can expect to take home $1,233 a month, the site estimates. That’s one third the take-home pay of a dental hygienist.

The best jobs of 2013 — ranked by pay, work environment, stress and job opportunities — start with actuary, biomedical engineer, software engineer and audiologist, according to CareerCast. Dental hygienist, ranked sixth, is the top job that requires only an associate degree. Pay averages $68,250 and demand is growing rapidly, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Among fast-growing jobs, occupations requiring an associate’s degree had the highest average growth — 35 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Health care jobs are driving the rapid expansion of jobs requiring a two-year degree.

Three careers made the high-pay and high-growth list: registered nurse, medical sonographer and dental hygienist.

“Students and their families should have this information at their fingertips so they can make better-informed decisions about where to enroll, what to major in and how much debt they might comfortably take on relative to their likely earnings,” Mark Schneider, vice president of the nonprofit American Institutes for Research, told Congress last month.

Tennessee, Arkansas, Colorado, Nevada and Texas are working on providing similar data and Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) have written a bipartisan bill, the “Student Right to Know Before You Go Act,” which would encourage the trend, reports the Post.

Virginia’s site has limitations: It doesn’t include salary information for graduates who left the state or work in the military or federal government. It also doesn’t track four-year graduates who enrolled in graduate school rather than seeking a job. It may understate the long-term value of a bachelor’s degree.

In the first few years after college, vocational training pays off, according to 2009-10 data. The wages by degree levels chart shows higher median earnings for short-term certificate holders ($30,548) than for graduates with certificates taking more than a year but less than two ($28,490). Graduates with an associate degree designed for transfer students averaged $27,693, while new graduates with an associate degree in an occupational or technical field — nursing is the most common — averaged $36,372. Two-year occupational graduates earned more than four-year graduates ($33,122).

According to the wages by program chart, a two-year graduate in auto mechanics averages $32,521, while a four-year graduate in communications/journalism averages $22,547. A dental hygienist with an associate degree averages $ 52,246, more than a hygienist with a bachelor’s degree.

Community College Spotlight is written by Joanne Jacobs. It provides a forum for discussion and debate about America’s community colleges, which are home to nearly half of all college students in the U.S.
Views expressed on the blog are those of Joanne Jacobs and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of The Hechinger Report or the Hechinger Institute. MORE